enervated by a soft climate and accustomed to peaceful employments, bore the same relation to other Asiatics which the Asiatics generally bear to the bold and energetic children of Europe.  The Castilians have a proverb, that in Valencia the earth is water and the men women; and the description is at least equally applicable to the vast plain of the Lower Ganges.  Whatever the Bengalee does he does languidly.  His favourite pursuits are sedentary.  He shrinks from bodily exertion; and, though voluble in dispute, and singularly pertinacious in the war of chicane, he seldom engages in a personal conflict, and scarcely ever enlists as a soldier.  We doubt whether there be a hundred genuine Bengalees in the whole army of the East India Company.  There never, perhaps, existed a people so thoroughly fitted by nature and by habit for a foreign yoke.

The great commercial companies of Europe had long possessed factories in Bengal.  The French were settled, as they still are, at Chandernagore on the Hoogley.  Higher up the stream the Dutch held Chinsurah.  Nearer to the sea, the English had built Fort William.  A church and ample warehouses rose in the vicinity.  A row of spacious houses, belonging to the chief factors of the East India Company, lined the banks of the river; and in the neighbourhood had sprung up a large and busy native town, where some Hindoo merchants of great opulence had fixed their abode.  But the tract now covered by the palaces of Chowringhee contained only a few miserable huts thatched with straw.  A jungle, abandoned to waterfowl and alligators, covered the site of the present Citadel, and the Course, which is now daily crowded at sunset with the gayest equipages of Calcutta.  For the ground on which the settlement stood, the English, like other great landholders, paid rent to the Government; and they were, like other great landholders, permitted to exercise a certain jurisdiction within their domain.

The great province of Bengal, together with Orissa and Bahar, had long been governed by a viceroy, whom the English called Aliverdy Khan, and who, like the other viceroys of the Mogul, had become virtually independent.  He died in 1756, and the sovereignty descended to his grandson, a youth under twenty years of age, who bore the name of Surajah Dowlah.  Oriental despots are perhaps the worst class of human beings; and this unhappy boy was one of the worst specimens of his class.  His understanding was naturally feeble, and his temper naturally unamiable.  His education had been such as would have enervated even a vigorous intellect, and perverted even a generous disposition.  He was unreasonable, because nobody ever dared to reason with him, and selfish, because he had never been made to feel himself dependent on the goodwill of others.  Early debauchery had unnerved his body and his mind.  He indulged immoderately in the use of ardent spirits, which inflamed his weak brain almost to madness.  His chosen companions